Tuesday, January 13, 2015

Five Bloody Graves (Independent-International, 1969)

A hamburger western

While
Italians were churning out cheap ‘westerns’ in Spain in the late 1960s, a few
Americans were trying the same formula in Utah. They produced ‘American
spaghetti’, what you might call burger westerns perhaps, cheap knock-off oaters with a slightly
modern twist. Fair enough. Small independent producers had always been making B
(or C) Westerns. This one was the brainchild of Robert Dix, sixth-billed in the
trashy Forty Guns and son of Richard.
Dix was producer, star and writer of Five
Bloody Graves so it’s hard to blame anyone else.

Howard
Thompson in The New York Times said
it was “a perfectly awful little Western without a single gory grave.” He had a
point. It is pretty bad, though I would say marginally better than most spaghettis.

After
the garish spag-like titles it’s an Arizona whites-against-Apaches story. The Indians
are referred to as “Yaquis, the worst kind of Apaches.” The ‘hero’ (Dix) is Ben
Thompson. The name, if not the character of poor old Ben Thompson (1843 – 1884)
was used again and again in Westerns, as I said the other day when reviewing Shotgun. None of the depictions resembled him in
the least.

The real Ben Thompson

The real Thompson fought for the Confederacy, then the Emperor of
Mexico. He gained a reputation as a gunfighter and became a habitué of Bat Masterson and the Earps in Dodge in the 1870s. He was hired in 1881 as marshal in Austin, Texas, where he was very
effective. Thompson was murdered at the age
of 40 in San Antonio in the so-called Vaudeville Theater Ambush. Denver Pyle
was Ben in The Life and Legend of Wyatt
Earp on TV. In Five Bloody Graves
Dix's Thompson is an errant gunslinger pining the loss of his murdered wife and
seeking death, though he is the only character in the movie not to find it. Given
the quality of the film he was responsible for, this seems a little unfair.

The only
thing which marks this movie out as anywhere remotely different is the fact
that it is narrated by Death as a voiceover. They used the voice of aging actor
Gene Raymond. Death gets his fill of corpses.

Less of
a narrative than a series of episodic flurries of action, it tells of how Ben
rescues a woman (Vicki Volante) but she and her jealous husband (Ken Osborne)
are then killed by Yaquis in a raid on their farm. There’s another plot of two
wicked types who sell guns to the Indians, Clay Bates, played by Jim Davis, and
his sidekick Horace (Ray Young). They murder an Indian woman who turns out to be
the wife of another character, the half-breed Joe Lightfoot (John ‘Bud’ Cardos,
a co-producer and in charge of stunts). Once Lightfoot finds out about it, he
is seriously annoyed. All these characters then meet up with a wagon party in
which Jim Davis’s co-stars appear: there’s a rather overweight Scott Brady, dude
gambler, and cadaverous John Carradine, a lecherous preacher. They are
accompanied by three saloon gals, Althea, Kansas and Lavinia (Tara Ashton, Paula
Raymond and Julie Edwards respectively). These ladies provide a bit of love
interest.

The men are not lust-mad. In fact they are very decorous mostly.

The rest
of the story is about how this ragged party staggers on and one by one its
members are killed, either by the Yaquis or each other.

The
writing is pretty clunky and contains lines of the quality of “It’s quiet, too
quiet.”

The
Indians are simply nameless, characterless extras to shoot and be shot.

The
sound quality and picture quality are poor. It needs remastering but wouldn’t
be worth it. Amazingly, considering the dodgy camera work, the cinematographer was
Vilmos Zsigmond, who had done the equally dire Deadwood ’76 in 1965 but who was later to produce visual masterpieces of
the Western genre McCabe & Mrs.Miller (1971) and Heaven’s Gate (1980) as well
as the fun Maverick in 1994. Something radical happened between Five Bloody Graves and McCabe & Mrs. Miller. Maybe Vilmos met Mephistopheles or did a Robert Johnson-type deal at a lonely crossroads.

The
editing (Bill Faris and Pete Perry are ‘credited’) is lousy, with key climax
moments skipped (perhaps for censorship reasons) so that we have the build-up
and aftermath but not the deed.

The director
was Al Adamson, who made a slew of cheap movies for the drive-in market. He directed
six Westerns in all, all bad.

The best
bit is when preacher Carradine shoots Horace with a derringer.

Al Adamson, the director, learned the trade of making cheap, schlocky films at the feet of his father, Victor. Victor's films are legendary for misspelled titles, misspelled actors' names in the credits, out of focus photography, and inaudible sound. Most of them were filmed in two days and have to be seen to be believed.